As an experimental particle physicist,
I want to understand the basic building blocks that make up our universe and the physical laws
that govern how it behaves. It's incredible to me that by exploring subtle properties of fundamental matter in experiments here on Earth,
we can help piece together a detailed understanding of the history of our universe back to its very earliest moments 13.7 billion years ago.
We currently know of 12 fundamental particles (6 quarks and 6 leptons)
and 4 forces that act on them (electromagnetism, gravity, and the strong and weak nuclear forces).
The detailed properties that we have managed to measure in experiments and the remarkably precise
mathematical theory that describes the interactions between these particles are together known as the
Standard Model of Particle Physics.

My research focuses on better understanding the
neutrinos,
listed as νe, νμ, and ντ in the diagram to the right. Neutrinos are the most
abundant known matter particles in the universe, outnumbering protons, neutrons and electrons by a factor of a billion. However, neutrinos
only interact through the most feeble of the four forces, the weak nuclear force, so they are challenging to detect and study,
and as a result we know the least about them.

Our main focus at the moment is on the Fermilab Short-Baseline Neutrino (SBN) program and the physics of sterile neutrinos including
MicroBooNE and the
Short-Baseline Near Detector, SBND.
We are excited to report that the SBN Program has been awarded Stage-2 approval at Fermilab in February, 2016!

We are also collaborating on a test beam effort known as LAriAT
(Liquid Argon in a Test Beam). In LArIAT we are placing a small liquid argon TPC into a well characterized charged particle beam at Fermilab
to make precise measurements of the response to known inputs and to measure important hadronic interaction cross sections on Ar.

Our current efforts on the SBN and LArIAT programs are well aligned with our future goals of realizing the
DUNE long-baseline neutrino experiment
that will seek to determine, among other things, if neutrinos and antinuetrinos behave differently.
If they do, then neutrinos may help us understand why our universe if made up mostly of matter and not antimatter,
a major but seemlingly basic unaswered question in science today!

"A measurement of hadron production cross sections for the
simulation of accelerator neutrino beams and a search for
muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations in the mass-squared ~ 1 eV^2
region"